April showers

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Splish, splash.
Splish, splash.

We’ve enjoyed a couple days of rain here in Bibleburg. It’s a nice change from precip’ you have to shovel, but it makes the trails awful gooey, especially in Palmer Park, where most of the nifty single-track has a clay base that holds onto tire tracks the way a bog-trotter does grudges.

No matter. I haven’t had a chance to get out anyway. Too busy serving up news nuggets out of the old velo-barrel. I don’t work much or very hard, not compared to most folks, but the chores do tend to bunch up every other week, making Sunday through Wednesday feel like Bizarro Santa’s workshop on Dec. 24, with platoons of red-eyed elves scurrying around like roaches and the fat man barking orders. Fill the bag, bitches, time’s a-wastin’. Places to go, people to see.

Some light work for VeloNews.com drifted over from Monday into this morning. That done, it’s time to crank up the laugh factory for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, which requires a distinct shifting of mental gears. Grinding and clashing noises ensue.

During my 11 years as a newspaper copy editor I rarely wrote anything under my own byline. Something about banging away on other people’s stories dulls the desire to tell any of your own; for me, at least. Writing comes mores easily now that I’m not a full-time rim rat, but occasionally it still feels like trying to start the White Tornado on a winter morning. Floor it three or four times, twist the key, hear her crank, c’mon you sonofabitch … errr rrr rrr … stomp stomp … errr rrr rrr … stomp stomp stomp … errr rrr rrr. …

And on the seventh day, he worked

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Chairman Meow's tomb is a colorful sight come springtime.
Chairman Meow's tomb is a colorful sight come springtime.

Chasing typos around the Intertubes instead of wheels along the trail. Feh. Sunday is no-fun day if you happen to be an editor for a cycling website, even a part-time one.

They’re racing everywhere this weekend, on roads and trails, from Belgium to California — Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Little 500, the Athens Twilight Criterium, the Historic Roswell Criterium, the Santa Ynez Valley Classic and the Dana Point Grand Prix.

Each writer presents a different editorial challenge (some understand deadlines and English, others not so much); each promoter supplies results in a different fashion (HTML, Excel, PDF or not at all); each photographer has his own little quirks (giant jpgs with incomprehensible filenames, teensy jpgs with no captions). I, of course, bring my own peculiar habits (surly bibulousness) to the project.

Back in the day, when I was still a newspaperman instead of whatever it is that I am now, all these disparate personalities congregated under one roof, where we could all shout at each other over not much and then go get convivially shitfaced once the presses started rumbling.

Now we’re in Spain, Belgium, Wyoming, Boulder, Georgia, California and Bibleburg, and shouting over IM or via e-mail just isn’t the same. Plus a guy in León can hardly buy a round for another guy in Bibleburg, and vice versa.

We had more hands back in the day, too. We’re always undermanned at VeloNews.com, but this weekend the herd is especially thin for a number of perfectly defensible reasons. So instead of doing a little leisurely swashbuckling through a couple of short stories, I found myself pretty much glued to the office chair from 6:30 a.m. to late afternoon, hacking at this and that, frantically twisting my Strunk & White Secret Decoder Ring and muttering dire imprecations that would land you a chat with Human Resources in one of today’s newsrooms. And it ain’t over yet. California and Georgia have yet to check in. And they wonder why I drink.

I did get out to snap a couple pix of Chairman Meow’s tomb, though. She has a colorful honor guard again this spring, and if it ever rains, they should get plenty of reinforcements.

What, no salsa?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Wait a moment — did I leave the gas on? No! I'm a fuckin' squirrel!
Did I leave the gas on? No! No, I'm a fuckin' squirrel!

Is that Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn.? Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.? Pat Buchanan? Nope — it’s Blondie the squirrel, enjoying a healthy organic corn chip taken straight from the dainty hand of Herself, who also snapped the pic. “Fucking nuts!” he seems to say. “Fed up with them always. I long for a grapefruit.”

Squirrels are said to live from six to 10 years, so Blondie, like me, must be a geezer. He’s been panhandling the neighborhood since we moved in seven years ago and is absolutely fearless — he’ll stroll right up to you like a Bibleburg wino hunting a handout.

If you’re a Bibleburger into squirrels, organic chips and other such tree-huggery, don’t miss today’s Pikes Peak Earth Day extravaganza at Cornerstone Arts Center. Blondie won’t be there, but you should be.

Blue skies, smiling at me

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Enjoying a hint of springtime on the back deck.
Enjoying a hint of springtime on the back deck.

No, that’s not the stairway to heaven — that’s a shot of the pergola over our back deck, taken from a folding chair while the cats chase bugs around the yard. Alas, those beautiful blue skies are supposed to give way to showers this weekend, a little gift from the gods to the body-armored knuckleheads who live for manhandling their double-boingers across the wet clay trails of Palmer Park, where their tracks will remain for alien archaeologists to ponder some eons hence.

Speaking of dark clouds, some of you may wonder why I haven’t weighed in on the debate over “enhanced interrogation techniques” that has been so much in the news of late. It’s because in a sane society no debate should be required. Torture is wrong, period, end of story. And anyone who says otherwise should be tortured.

And speaking of torture, there is much bicycle racing coming to flyover country here as April segues into May. There’s the 31st edition of La Vuelta de Bisbee, which starts today in the Arizona town of the same name, and the 23rd annual Tour of the Gila, which kicks off April 29 in Silver City, N.M. I covered LVDB once, back in the day, but I’ve never been to the Gila. VeloNews.com’s grand poobah, Steve Frothingham, is headed that way again this year, so look for lots of word count, pix and maybe even some video.

Earth Day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
The old (right) and the new (left).
The old (right) and the new (left).

This being Earth Day, I thought I’d ride on some. Poked a sharp stick at a few colleagues confined to their respective cages and rolled away. The legs, as Chris Horner might say, were not good, so I thought I’d take a little light exercise in Palmer Park. So, apparently, did everyone else.

Oddly, it was a pleasant outing, despite the crowds. Without exception, everyone I encountered was just happy to be there — a pair of women cyclists battling a balky derailleur, a lone horseman, various dog-walkers, a couple of strolling teens, a mountain biker taking a wrong line into oncoming traffic (me).

I was on a mountain bike, too, and enjoyed something not unlike zazen on two wheels until the drivetrain started acting up after about 90 minutes. My right-hand Sachs twist-shifter had finally gone to its reward after 15 or so years, so I manhandled it into a cog I could live with and rolled it on home.

After a snack I chucked the bike in the back of the White Tornado (another of the various beaters infesting the DogHaus) and headed for Old Town Bike Shop, where a crowd of mechanics gathered around the ailing two-wheeler like surgeons in an operating theater. As they marveled at the geezer-mobile, discussing repairs, workarounds and replacements, I was reminded of a scene from “The Milagro Beanfield War” by John Nichols:

But finally, at 76, there loomed on Amarante’s horizon a Waterloo. Doc Gómez in the clinic at Doña Luz sent him to a doctor at the Chamisaville Holy Cross Hospital who did a physical, took X-rays, shook his head, and sent the old man to St. Claire’s in the capital where a stomach specialist, after doing a number of tests and barium X-rays and so forth, came to the conclusion that just about everything below Amarante’s neck had to go, and the various family members were notified.

I had been thinking in terms of a similarly radical intervention, perhaps a pair of Shimano bar-cons mated to Paul’s Thumbies, or (gasp) an upgrade to nine-speed. Happily, like Amarante, the old DBR Axis TT has defied the Grim Reaper and rolls on, thanks to a quick and inexpensive Grip Shift transplant. Chapeau to the OTBS folks.